United Or Open

United or Open? The European Alternative

(Jean Monnet Lecture, Sabanci University, 5. Oct. 2005)

Lord Ralf Dahrendorf

Large parts of Western and now also Southern Europe have enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity unprecedented in modern times. Those who remember the zero hour of the end of the Second World War in 1945 thank their lucky stars every day for the experience. Rather, they thank those who were responsible for the fact that in the place of the trenches and ruins we now see flourishing cities and countries. Much of it is the work of Europe's citizens who have learned the lessons of history and then taken hold of their own destiny. Beyond that, the

United States of America have protected and promoted the new opportunities of the post-war era. NATO and the Marshall Plan are expressions of a commitment for which the beneficiaries owe a lasting debt of gratitude. Both however, the actions of Europeans and the help of America, have been strengthened and put on a permanent basis by the process of

European unification. This belongs to the remarkable achievements of the last decades.

In fact the process got going stumblingly, with many detours and after occasional accidents.

Winston Churchill’s grand design of 1945 fell on a soil on which some flowers blossomed but noone had the courage or the wherewithal to make the whole garden bloom. There was and still is no political union of Europe. Should there be? This is one of my subjects in this lecture. If one does not believe in a World Spirit who appeared in Churchill’s appeals of

Strasbourg and Zurich and then proceeded to pave the inexorable –if not always recognizable- way to the United States of Europe, one must be allowed to wonder why we should seek that

“ever closer Union” of Europe which the Treaty of Rome, the basis of the EEC, invokes. Are there not higher values than the unity of Europe? Or to put it differently: is that unity not desirable only if it serves those higher values? Do we really want a Europe which is not open for that cosmopolitan order which Timothy Garton Ash has called, Free World?

The beginnings of the process of European unification after the Second World War were characterized by the failure of great projects. Several French-inspired projects of a political union never reached the point of decision. The substitute plan of a European Defence

Community found no majority in the French Parliament. The Organization for European

Economic Development (OEEC) was extended into an organization of the Free World, the

OECD. The Council of Europe became and remained the guardian of the European

Convention of Human Rights; despite its limitations it is to the present day a strong pillar of a free Europe.

When the direct route failed however, indirect projects for uniting Europe began. The

Schuman Plan had several objectives, but was seen by at least one great European, Jean

Monnet, the first president of the European Coal and Steel Community, as the practical beginning of the process of unification. In 1957, the European Economic Community (EEC) was set up, and its first President, Walter Hallstein, gave such hopes a name. He coined the notion of the “logic of things” (Sachlogik) as the crucial motive force of European unification.

“It is an anonymous force though it too operates through the human will.” Its principle is simple: “if you say A you must say B as well”. If one starts with the internal market, one sets in motion a “psychological chain reaction of integration” which “will not stop at the borders of economic and social policy”. Within these limits moreover the “logic of things” means that the intention “to create internal market-like conditions within the space of the community” has consequences for economic activities which are not market-determined. Here “there remains no other choice than to take policies under a community discipline (e.g. in agriculture, in transport)”. This is how the CAP, the common agricultural policy came about. If one is as sceptical about the logic of things as about the world spirit, one is bound to raise questions and more, doubts.

Even as significant a decision as monetary union has not so far – as any logic of things would have suggested – led to a common economic policy. One might almost argue that on the contrary divergent national economic policies threaten along with the Stability Pact the common currency itself. One problem of the process of European unification consists in a logic which is very different from that hoped for by Monnet and Hallstein. In a strange way, some of the future-oriented intentions of the European Communities from the ECSC to the

EU have turned into measures for protecting the status quo. Thus protectionism and closure have taken the place of openness.

In the case of the Coal and Steel Community this was nobody’s fault. When the Schuman

Plan was debated in the parliaments of the six founding members in 1951, it was still plausible to assume that coal and steel are industries of the future. Whoever has these basic industries has everything else as well. Moreover it had been one of the motives of the terrible wars that Germany wanted French iron ore and France German coal (and both the Saar territory). Ten years after 1951 things had begun to change fundamentally. The old raw materials were cheaper to buy on the world market than to mine at home. Coal and iron and steel turned from an asset into a liability. They had to be subsidised in order to be maintained.

Moreover the large number of redundant miners and steelworkers needed assistance. In the end noone wanted the Saarland any more, and Lorraine and the Ruhr area gave little cause for hope in the future. Thus the ECSC turned by the course of events, thus by an unexpected logic of things, from a nucleus of European strength into a costly vehicle of subsidies, of protectionism and social assistance. In agriculture an analogous process was soon evident when the EEC followed in 1957

Hallstein’s logic and put in place a common agricultural policy along with the common market. In fact Hallstein entertained an even more adventurous hope: a common agricultural policy means common prices; these have to be expressed in a common currency unit, the

“green dollar” (as it was called); thus one day (according to Hallstein) a single currency follows by an inescapable logic. What followed in fact was above all enormous cost partly for subsidizing agriculture and its trade, partly to assist the inevitable structural changes in rural areas. Even in 2005, more than 40 percent of the European budget consists of expenditure resulting directly from the common agricultural policy.

In this way a backward-looking, protectionist approach began to characterize Brussels at an early date. It led to absurdities like the simultaneous subsidies for tobacco growers and support for a Europe-wide campaign against smoking. It weakened Europe’s position in trade policy, to say nothing of the consequences of this position for the Third World. Above all it created a climate in which lobbies, but also countries turn to Brussels whenever they seek protection from real or imagined threats.

Such developments perhaps had to have ramifications for “Brussels” in that slightly awkward, even embarrassed sense in which the word is used by many today. Brussels itself, that is to say the European institutions, increasingly became a closed society. Whoever wants to belong has to accept all assumptions of this society, whoever does not accept them or merely questions them, is excluded. The British-German Labour MP Gisela Stuart, who belonged to the Presidium of the Convention for the Constitutional Treaty, has put this forcefully in her paper on The Making of Europe’s Constitution using the so-called acquis communautaire as an example. What the Union has done or acquired, is beyond doubt or debate. “Discussion concentrated exclusively on where we could do even more at the European level. Any delegate who put the fundamental goal of deeper integration in question, was marginalized.”

Many a further story could be told about “Brussels” in this sense.

In recent years, the propensity of the European Union to turn inward, to protect what has been achieved, to draw lines around it and define subjects and countries out, has reached a new dimension. After the end of the Cold War and the accession of the post-communist countries in peace and prosperity are for many no longer enough. In the “old Europe” above all, that is the original union of the six founding states, the search for reasons for an “ever closer Union” has led to new heights of securing the status quo and defining other either totally in or totally out. This takes on practical forms in all matters concerning migration, that is mobility in search of work and immigration of asylum seekers is concerned, but is applied above all to two major and related themes: protection of the so-called “European social model” and delimitation form the United States of America. An intensified debate about the boundaries of the EU underlines the impression of a Union which sees itself no longer as a future-oriented and hence open association, but as a backward-looking, anxious and hence protective club.

Before we consider a little more closely what forces are at work here and above all what paths may lead back to the direction of an open Europe, some correction of the picture drawn so far is necessary. Not everything that the European Union has done in the last decades, led either deliberately or unwittingly towards greater closure. There is an alternative balance sheet.

This begins with the greatest achievement of the European Union, the Single Market. The significance of the path from a common market to a single market is not always understood.

The importance of the four freedoms of the unitary market, that is the free movement of persons and goods, services and capital, is often underrated and sometimes described as a

“mere free-trade zone”. The freedoms involve in fact the creation of a large open economic space, thus one of the core elements of a Free World, the other one being political democracy. Both require the rule of law. Moreover, the single market has a strong innate tendency to extend itself beyond its borders, and thus to remain open for a single world market under the rules of the WTO.

A second achievement of an open Europe to be considered on the credit side of its balance sheet is enlargement itself. The process has never been simple, as the British example shows.

It has however always led to a deepening of cooperation as well. In a sense enlargement is a deepening process. The enormous forces of growth which the EU has released within its new members are in themselves a process of European significance. It is therefore pathetic if the old members of the EU get cold feet after the latest enlargement and try to fence themselves in by longer transition periods, the correction of competition-promoting directives, budget cuts and also the patronizing treatment of new members. All this is not only pathetic, but also inefficient.

This poses the question of the borders up to which enlargement of the EU may, can, should proceed. The plea for an open Europe advanced in this lecture does not accept any ultimate borders drawn by some geography teachers or even foreign ministers in old member states.

The borders are where they are drawn at any given time, but at all times they should be wider rather than narrower. This is why I see no reason why a country which is a part of Europe in

UEFA-football and the Eurovision Song Contest, but also through the Human Rights

Convention of the Council of Europe and the Euro-Group of NATO should not belong to the

European Union. For me the inclusion of Turkey is a part of the open Europe which I advocate.

This is especially the case since the European Union has agreed, in June 1993 in Copenhagen, political and economic criteria applied to all new member states. The highly readable document, a mere three pages long, counts among the most important decisions ever taken by the EU. It helps that they are couched in clear, comprehensible language. Here are the political criteria as an example:

“ They are democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for minorities. Countries which want to become members of the EU are expected not only to recognize the principles of democracy and the rule of law, but also to practice them in everyday life. They must also secure the stability of the various institutions which enable authorities like courts, the police and local administration to function effectively and thus to consolidate democracy.”

These criteria are moreover explicitly linked to the European Convention of Human Rights and the Council of Europe – in itself a sign of openness which does not always characterize the EU.

Some would add to the list of the steps towards an open Europe the decisions which the EU has taken in 2000 in Lisbon in order to strengthen the competitiveness of Europe’s economy.

These decisions in support of innovation, liberalization, the dynamism of enterprises, employment and the environment are indeed a model of openness for the world. They are however also an example of what must be called the almost institutionalized failure of good intentions in the EU. When Commission President Delors paved the way towards the single market, he had by his side Commissioner Lord Cockfield who translated the principle into over 270 particular decisions of the European Communities. When it comes to the Lisbon

Agenda, there is no Lord Cockfield, but more than that, there cannot be one because the necessary particular decisions lie very largely outside the competence of the EU. It is therefore not surprising if the London Centre for European Reform in its (fifth) Lisbon

Assessment of 2005 concludes that on a scale from A to E the Union deserves at best a C for its efforts. This then is how the European balance looks with regard to the openness of the real Union: it is expensive and moderately effective in protecting the status quo and assisting the losers of change, with some successes, but also failures on the side of more future-oriented projects.

This may not be a very satisfactory balance but would be bearable if it was not for the extraordinary claims made for the EU. Political elites wanted to prescribe a constitution for it.

The EU is supposed to become a power, even a big power in international affairs. In important policy areas it is supposed to replace the nation states. Ideally it should be – even if the Convention has dissuaded its President Giscard d’Estaing from insisting on the phrase – something like the nucleus of the United States of Europe. The Brussels Convention has been compared with that of Philadelphia in 1776.

Why all this? Is the contribution of the EU towards peace and prosperity not enough? Could one not concentrate on improving the balance of openness of the EU and beyond that enable further countries to enjoy what peace and prosperity membership can offer? Why then the desire for an “ever closer union” with at least quasi-statelike symbols and institutions?

These are precisely the “forbidden” questions of Brussels to which Gisela Stuart referred.

Now that the project of a European constitution has failed, we do well to pose them anyway and to seek answers which do not just please the habitués of European affairs. Let me have a somewhat closer look at two themes which dominate what has been called the philosophical debate Europe in these years: that of the so-called European identity, and that of Europe as a pole of power in a multipolar world. Both themes inevitably lead into the difficult area of relations between Europe and America.

In recent years, publications on the question of the “idea of Europe” or its “identity” have multiplied. Underlying the theme there is the explicit or implicit theory that the unity of

Europe is not just a political project but the execution of an historical destiny. This is not a new idea, though one is less likely to find it in countries inspired by John Locke and David

Hume than by Herder and Hegel. Walter Hallstein, the first of the two great Presidents of the

European Commission, saw European unification as “an organic process which translates a structural unity long-entrenched in culture, economy and political consciousness and thus already present, into a definitive political form”. The second great President of the European

Commission, Jacques Delors, even spoke of “Europe’s soul” which needs to be found.

A commission set up by Commission President Prodi under the chairmanship of the Polish philosopher Krzysztof Michalski took up this idea and asked what it is that holds Europe together since the single market and even the political institutions do not suffice to achieve cohesion. It is, they concluded, the “common European culture”. Europe is a “common culture space” before it is an economic space and gives itself a political constitution. The common culture creates the necessary solidarity. Then the critical statement follows: “This solidarity must be stronger than the universal solidarity which people (should) feel for other people when for example they provide humanitarian aid.”

The cultural philosopher George Steiner expresses all this in his more entertaining language.

In his Nexus Lecture given in 2004 in Tilburg in Holland on the “Idea of Europe” he calls

Europe the continent of coffee houses. They exist from Lisbon to Odessa and Copenhagen to

Palermo although barely in Moscow and not in England either. And of course there are “none in North America apart from the Gallic outpost New Orleans”. All this leads Steiner to the conclusion: “It is vital that Europe asserts certain convictions and ventures of the soul which the Americanization of the planet – with all its advantages and generosities – has obscured.”

It is only fair to add that such Gallic cultural pessimism was alien to Hallstein and also to

Michalski’s reflexion group. European unification “is not inaccessible or hostile but open,”

Hallstein says. The reflexion group of Michalski stresses time and again that the European cultural space is “in principle open”. “Thus Europe and its cultural identity live by the permanent confrontation with the new, the different, the alien – Europe’s borders must be permanently re-negotiated.”

Yet the very intention to derive the concrete process of European cooperation and integration from some deeper identity or higher idea seems to me misguided. Even the attempt to describe the peculiarity of a European cultural space takes us to features which are not confined to Europe either historically or philosophically. This is notably true for that core element of any definition of a community of values which can be roughly yet adequately described by the notion of “enlightenment”. In theory and practice enlightenment includes

America. At the same time, Europe has many nooks and crannies which were only very partly touched by such values. At times they were lacking in the very centre of Europe. “Special path” or not, the German debate which the American historian Fritz Stern for example has initiated when he wrote about “the politics of cultural despair”, cannot simply be ignored once the word, Europe, is used.

Europe is above all diversity. (Incidentally, it does not follow logically from the praise of diversity that unity must be created, though it follows from unity that diversity is restricted.)

To emphasize diversity is relevant also with regard to the apparent concreteness of that version of the European identity which is increasingly expressed by the notion of a “European social model”. The confrontation of Anglo-Saxon and Continental social indicators in particular is often neither factually correct nor politically meaningful. A thorough empirical study by Jens Alber shows that in the Europe of the EU there is an extraordinary range of

“models” of social conditions. Some of these are closer to the American “model”, others further removed. Moreover, in important respects like the appreciation of independence or the acceptance of inequality, prevailing French views are particularly close to those of the US. In his cautious language, always backed by empirical data, Jens Alber summarizes that it has

“emerged that differences within Europe are for the most part greater than the difference between the European Union and the USA”. In the light of studies like Alber’s one might even conclude that in the admittedly unlikely case of the United States becoming a member of the EU, they would at any rate not stand out by virtue of their social model.

All this is not to say that there are no relevant differences between Europe and America. Why do we love Tocqueville, if not for the description of such differences? Also, there are undoubtedly European interests which are not American interests. A large part of the EU portfolios on justice and home affairs belongs in this category. In foreign policy too there are

European interests which complement those of America without being identical with them.

But when it comes to Joseph Nye’s widely used distinction between “hard” and “soft power”, a degree of caution is in place. In important matters (like the Iranian nuclear programme or peace in the Middle East) there is no “soft power” which does not have to be backed up by the

“hard”, that is the military variant. In any case, France and Britain are not prepared to share what is left of their hard power with others, and the post-communist countries knew very well why they joined first NATO and only then the EU.

Such considerations lead almost inevitably to a policy of cooperation between Europe and

America. In any case, the confrontation which some seek today is a consequential mistake. As a stimulus of European unification it is an illusion. As an implication of the notion of a multipolar world view it is a dangerous betrayal of the common values of the enlightened world. Jürgen Habermas is too subtle and also too deeply tied to the thinking and the thinkers of America ever to take such a crude position. Nevertheless the thrust of the “plea for a common foreign policy beginning in core Europe” (published in May 2003 in his name and that of Jacques Derrida) must be understood as a plea for an independent, explicitly non- American European identity. Its central features are the social model and opposition to hard power especially in the case of Iraq.

Timothy Carton Ash and I replied in the ensuing discussion (in July 2003) with a decidedly different position. We spoke of the spirit of applied enlightenment and a renewal of Europe in this spirit. Garton Ash has since developed this notion in his book Free World. The book is important because it takes us beyond the old concept of The West and makes it clear that what is at issue is a basic approach which can claim universal validity. Looking at the institutions of the world in which we live at the beginning of the 21st century, I have proposed the idea that a political organization in parallel to the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development, should be created. Spreading what in shorthand is called

“democracy”, that is the liberal order almost in the sense of the Copenhagen Criteria of the

EU, is a noble task. It requires action by the community of the existing democracies, in that sense an OPCD, and Organization for Political Co-operation and Development.

In the end Europe makes sense only if it contributes to the advancement and dissemination of the liberal order. This it can achieve only if it is open in a dual sense: open towards all others in the world beginning with its neighbours, but open also in the character of its policies, from the service regulation for migrant workers to the agricultural policy, from the treatment of asylum seekers to the promotion of innovation.

Habermas and Derrida as well as Garton Ash and I have invoked Kant as a witness. Immanuel

Kant has of course – as tends to happen to great thinkers – been claimed by all sorts of interpreters in the 200 years since his death. There may be different views of what is authentic. However, Garton Ash and I found in Habermas and Derrida traces of Rousseau rather than Kant, at any rate an Arcadian picture of the order of human affairs, on which Kant had pungent things to say in his “Idea for a Universal History With Cosmopolitan Intent”. As against that we took a harder line which for example does not exclude regime change as an objective of international intervention. Europe is not just desirable as a peaceful welfare paradise sufficient onto itself, but as a model and a step in the direction of an order which can in principle claim validity for the whole world. The imperative of European politics is therefore: act in such a manner that whatever you do can be valid also as a principle of a universal order. Europe’s success is measured by its contribution to liberty.

Is that enough? In their book on The Cosmopolitan Europe Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande seem to advance a similar thesis. Beck’s “cosmopolitanism” opens up a quiet attractive prospect, for it “combines the appreciation of difference and diversity with efforts to conceive new democratic forms of political power beyond the nation-state”. However, Beck holds on to the attempt to enter a united Europe, indeed a “European Empire” into the cosmopolitan context. To me the approach by Herman Lübbe is more attractive who sees Europe as a community of interest in a world in which mutual dependence exists in larger spaces than

Europe can offer, and at the same time the “claims and chances of self-determination” of smaller states and “communities” tend to increase.

But again: is that enough? Can a Europe thus understood motivate indeed enthuse its citizens?

The Europe which I have sketched is quiet political; it is one which leaves its future neither to the logic of things nor to the world spirit. Its practical cohesion is guaranteed above all by what the British social economist Andrew Shonfield called, in his BBC Reith Lectures of

1972, the growing “habit of cooperation”. This habit creates both the preconditions of a cooperation which can be regarded as a model of governance in the age of globalization, and its continuing method.

The title of my lecture – “United or Open? The European Alternative” – postulates a contradiction of which many might say that it is at least unnecessary. Why should Europe not strive for an ever closer union and yet remain open to the inside as well as the outside? Was not that the dream of the great Europeans? My conclusion is however that this combination is useful only for Sunday sermons on Europe. In practice one has to decide between alternatives.

The constitutional treaty served Europe’s unity, not its openness. It is a good thing that we have been spared this treaty. Enlargement proves Europe’s openness even if it does not necessarily promote further unity. The Union should pursue it in good heart and thereby bring hope to the as yet quite imperfect states of the Western Balkans while at the same time strengthening the forces of open societies in Turkey, in the Ukraine and in its European neighbourhood generally.

Whether all this can engender enthusiasm among citizens certainly remains a question.

Perhaps it cannot. Bu it does not advance any cause to stylize Europe as the last Utopia, as has happened in the past on political Right and has today become fashionable on the Left. Such seduction will come to grief. It is not sufficient either to follow the example of the legendary

German economics minister Ludwig Erhard. In the parliamentary debate about ratification of the treaty setting up the European Economic Community Erhard took issue with the notion of regional economic union which was bound to disrupt free world trade. He earned applause for his statement: “Things are not sanctified by giving them the adjective ‘European’.” But then he made an about-turn to please his Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and said he would nevertheless of course vote for the EEC Treaty, “above all in order to awaken in European youth a faith that a happy Europe is about to come into being”.

This is an early version of the contradiction between European Sunday sermons and the reality of European unification. I regard this contradiction as one of the reasons why many citizens in the EU and at its gates turn away from organized Europe. That some accompany

European unification with their passion is honourable but not sufficient for giving the objective the high priority which the enthusiasts demand. For me liberty has priority. I am a rational rather than a passionate European but I am a passionate liberal. Europe has a place in my passions only if it opens the path to liberty further. For that reason, a more united Europe is desirable only as an open Europe. Thus the cosmopolitan intent is the yardstick of all politics in Europe.